The Making of 'Commotion'
(2023)
author(s): Sara Pinheiro
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
“Commotion” is a fixed media multichannel composition that revolved around the principles of minimalist music. This exposition aims at understanding these principles while it tries to place the process of composing the piece within the common premises of artistic research. Due to the nature of its context, this approach includes also theories of reception - mostly by exploring themes such as intentionality, interpretation and representation. With this exposition, the author shares technical terminology of sound practices, in order to promote it in contexts predominantly visual-oriented.
Hugging Atmospheres
(2023)
author(s): Elena Mooibroek
published in: Research Catalogue
The main question around this research paper is how can we translate ambiances? This ungraspable ‘something’? What is our relationship with the atmosphere of spaces that brings out our emotional state? Can we characterize atmospheres by simply giving them names? Giving them a place for their selves to develop.
I researched six certain atmospheres, Masculinity, Sound, Death, Warmth, Lust, and Serenity. They are the ones that I went through most recently before writing this research paper. I wanted them to all come together and hopefully come across an answer on how they might be useful in day-to-day life as an artist in creating art, but also in general, can we understand each other better while talking about them? They are unseen yet as important as our imagination.
Hoping for a translation of the ungraspable ‘something’. Into moments of poetry and storytelling to get a grip on where they touch each other. Giving them a platform/to create a world where atmospheres/ambiances are more visible. To have conversations with them to create an understanding of what they mean. And how they would look like. Along the way I figured, one can not stand on one’s self, they are all in need of the other. Which seems like a reflection of our reality.
Soft to the Touch: Performance, Vulnerability, and Entanglement in the Time of Covid
(2021)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
What is the nature of human touch and human contact in contemporary music performance, both in general and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? In a time when bodies must be kept at several meters distance, what comes of works which explicitly call for closeness, physical contact, and sharing? How might these works be interpreted differently in light of the COVID-19 pandemic? Percussionist and performer Jennifer Torrence reflects on the impact of the pandemic on her artistic practice and on her research as part of the project entitled Performing Precarity, which seeks to explore the inherent risks in performance when musicians and audiences are entangled in codependent structures. In light of COVID-19, this exposition attempts to unfold and trace modes of vulnerability in contemporary music performance—from human contact via eye contact and physical touch, to the precarious negotiation of shared space—and to reflect on how such encounters might breed new understandings and knowledge.
Materials of Sound: Sound As (More Than) Sound
(2018)
author(s): Caleb Kelly
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
By examining the materials that produce sound within contemporary art, we can approach sounding works not only from the perspective of “sound as sound” or “sound in itself” but rather as “sound as more than sound.” Sound can never be without a history, culture, or political situation, and by approaching sounding practices in the same manner as we critically approach contemporary art practices, we allow matter to matter.
Traumatic Ruins and The Archeology of Sound: William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops
(2018)
author(s): Lindsay Balfour
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. Located in the Museum’s Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski’s sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people. Additionally, this work also carries within itself far more: layers of meaning and spectral traces that are often missed during singular visits by museum guests and that recall aspects of memory and materiality crucial to the question of what it means to live alongside others. I want to suggest that, while existing as a differentiated work in its own right, it is through its in-situ role – a ruin in a place of ruins – that The Disintegration Loops recalls one of the most complex and contradictory paradigms for thinking about loss and for mourning alongside strangers. It initiates, I argue, a philosophy of hospitality that is, defined in this context, uniquely preoccupied with ideas of strangers, belonging, home, and homelessness and an ethics concerned with “das Unheimliche” or something odd that is not quite at home yet nonetheless present in that space. In this paper I will discuss the significance of Basinski’s work to aural and material memory and explore the concepts of ruins and dust to arrive at one of hospitality’s most startling and uncanny figures, a figure of autoimmunity that is powerfully raised in Basinski’s work, making it one of the most compelling pieces of art in the Museum.
Trigger Place - A Game of Sound and Architecture
(2017)
author(s): Matilde Meireles, Diogo Alvim
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
"Play" was a project developed by Matilde Meireles and Diogo Alvim with the participation of experimental filmmaker Richard O'Sullivan. This multilayered performance was specially conceived for the annex of the Physical Education Centre at Queen's University Belfast, a building composed of several squash courts and an audience area. The project encompassed live music (a brass ensemble), electronics, video projections, and a live squash game, all affecting the perception of the site.
This building became the main character of an immersive acoustic experience, where a game of squash was the starting point to explore ideas about architecture and place through sound. The squash courts were subject to acoustic processes extrapolated from two of Alvin Lucier's most important works—"Vespers" and "I am sitting in room". Also the floor markings were manipulated, as a reference to Edward Krasinski's obsession with a never-ending line. These extended beyond the performance space to reveal unexpected connections.
Record, Rewind, Rewrite. Acoustic Historiography with the Presidential Tapes
(2017)
author(s): Monika Dommann
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
A tool of audio manipulation available to all (recording, fast-forwarding and rewinding, dictating, deleting, overwriting, etc.), tape recorders became a universal feature of offices and living rooms in the 1950s. Between 1962 (when John F. Kennedy installed a secret recording system in his Oval Office) and July 1973 (when Richard Nixon’s extensive recording system was revealed in the aftermath of Watergate and switched off on 18 July) (Haldeman 1988: 86), taping was even used by American presidents as a secret memo technique. From the perspective of the history of knowledge and media studies, this article examines the explosive political force of sidestepping the ephemerality of verbal communication through the secret tape recordings, historical and archival examinations of the Presidential Tapes and their remixes in Public History and film projects, where communicative acts once concealed from the public now continue as endless media loops. A paradoxical form of acoustic nostalgia emerges here: It tackles the problem of invisible power and ritualised politics with a sensorially-accessible “presence” and acoustically-perceptible corporeality – drawing on media in the process. The plea for acoustic historiography developed in this article is an examination of the soundscapes previously neglected by historiography but augmented by media history. While historiography, up to the 20th century, could record the sounds, tones and voices of the past only through writing, the Soundscape Projects initiated by R. Murray Schafer since the 1970s used tape to store and document sound and to create acoustic archives. Since the 1990s, the digitalization of analogue magnetic tapes has facilitated previously inconceivable access to acoustic sources and contributed to the rise of Public History within general societal awareness. Acoustic historiography must therefore engage with the media characteristics of recording and playback devices; the social situations in which recordings are produced; the potential of acoustic sources for storage, manipulation and transmission and their use in art, politics and society.
Domesticated Noise: The Musical Reformation of Identity in Urban Vietnam
(2016)
author(s): Lonan O Briain
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In his composition “New Moon” (Trăng non), saxophonist Trần Mạnh Tuấn appropriates sounds from the musical cultures of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities to create a fusion of regional Vietnamese and international jazz music. The musical cultures are reduced to the raw sounds of instrument timbres which are then reformulated as part of a new popular style by the composer. His detachment of these sounds from the minority cultures and propagation of them as sonic referents to an internal Other nurtures an essentialized understanding of the minorities as different and distant from the urban majority. This research deploys Georgina Born’s proposal of four planes of distinct socialities that are mediated by music and sound (2011) to examine how the musical domestication of these ethnic-themed sounds contributes to the conceptualization of new economically-endowed social classes in urban Vietnam.
The Sound of Stuff – Archetypical Sound in Product Sound Design
(2015)
author(s): Anna Symanczyk
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Through their history, materiality, and use, products gain sonic qualities and attributes, which become an integral part of contemporary sound design for these objects. Taking the example of the vacuum cleaner, this article discusses the relationship between historical material properties and product sound design as well as between listening traditions and characteristic product sounds. It concludes that there is an archetypical sound for vacuum cleaners. Following the role of sound through several examples of advertisements, this article performs a cultural analysis of sounding objects and the communication surrounding these sounds in order to better understand the effects that archetypical sounds have on buyer or user perception of product sounds.
Tracing Rhythm
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Geir Harald Samuelsen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Rhythm is everywhere. It is breathing and beating hearts; it is the sound of a drum and the repetitive carved lines in stone done by a prehistoric human being. It is the flickering screen and a million digital processes too small to see. It is engraved in the depth of our minds and bodies. It is remembering.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, rhythm (Greek rhythmos, derived from rhein, “to flow”) is an ordered alternation of contrasting elements, and according to Roland Barthes both painting and writing started with the same gesture, one which was neither figurative nor semantic, but simply rhythmic.
In this exposition we are approaching rhythm through contemporary artistic and archaeological gestures, starting with some engraved and painted lines drawn by our stone age ancestors in France and South Africa.
The participants are all from the artisitc research project: Matter, Gesture and Soul, which is based at the Art Academy in Bergen.
Meridiana: Lines Toward a Non-local Alchemy
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard
This exposition is in revision and its share status is: visible to all.
“Meridiana: Lines toward a non-local Alchemy” investigates the line as a sonic, textual and visual phenomenon.
Taking off from the four
literary voices: the Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), the French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze (1925-1995) and the Chinese Taoists Lü Yan (796 C.E.) and Sun Buer (1119–1182 C.E.),
a multitude of meanings are interwoven in a rich network of musical, textual and graphic lines.
The line as a basic concept is emphasized by the first word of the title, Meridiana (plural for meridian), which has terminological roots in both the East and the West. In Western terminology, it denotes one
geographical line connecting the North and South Pole.
In the East, originating from ancient China, meridians (经络) are energy pathways of the body (both human and non-human), which connect internal organs and a number of vital points in a neurological network.
The meeting between these two interpretations of a "meridian", between the geo-physical and sub-physical, between East and West, are the cornerstones of the project, which intention is to weave together the various
meanings and emphases of meridian, while at the same time unfolding an expanding an intersection of lines:
sonic lines, textual lines, graphic lines.
On Time, Meditation and Creative Process
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): RC i2ADS, Fernando José Pereira
connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Martijn's Comes lecture "On Time, meditation and Creative process", places the discussion within the central assumptions of the research project " pára-agem." The idea of meditation, based on his Buddhist beliefs, can be interpreted in a secular way as an active contemplation, an essential notion for understanding our research. As a way of resisting the compression of time, both meditation and active contemplation became decisively involved in the creative process.
Speculative Sound
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Richy Carey
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Through this paper, I propose a way of considering audiovisuality as an object in and of itself, thinking through its materiality and the role language plays in its construction. I discuss Karen Barad’s Agential Realist methodology as a way of accessing this object with a view to exploring how this might affect the way we sound an image. I propose that the essay film, or an essay film/text hybrid, is the form that can best articulates this way of thinking. I conclude by asking how a diffracted reading of the {sound-image-language} object can be used as a methodology for sounding images.
“Commotion” is a fixed media multichannel composition that revolved around the principles of minimalist music. This exposition aims at understanding these principles while it tries to place the process of composing the piece within the common premises of artistic research. Due to the nature of its context, this approach includes also theories of reception - mostly by exploring themes such as intentionality, interpretation and representation. With this exposition, the author shares technical terminology of sound practices, in order to promote it in contexts predominantly visual-oriented.open exposition comments (0)
Martijn's Comes lecture "On Time, meditation and Creative process", places the discussion within the central assumptions of the research project " pára-agem." The idea of meditation, based on his Buddhist beliefs, can be interpreted in a secular way as an active contemplation, an essential notion for understanding our research. As a way of resisting the compression of time, both meditation and active contemplation became decisively involved in the creative process.open exposition comments (0)
Through this paper, I propose a way of considering audiovisuality as an object in and of itself, thinking through its materiality and the role language plays in its construction. I discuss Karen Barad’s Agential Realist methodology as a way of accessing this object with a view to exploring how this might affect the way we sound an image. I propose that the essay film, or an essay film/text hybrid, is the form that can best articulates this way of thinking. I conclude by asking how a diffracted reading of the {sound-image-language} object can be used as a methodology for sounding images.open exposition comments (0)